D&D General D&D's Utter Dominance Is Good or Bad Because...

[Shardstone]

Yeah, personally, i don't buy that BS about 5e being ever green final edition. They can taut that, but i'm willing to bet that few years down the line, there will be new edition. There is finite amount of tweaking 5E while maintaining full compatibility with everything published since 2014. Sooner or later, someone at Hasbro will just pull the plug and say- Ok people, time for something new.

I domt even know why this is debated.

 

[Oofta]

You see an awful lot of presentation of "a rising tide lifts all boats" with D&D, and everyone else should be glad of that, without a lot of evidence presented its true.

Conversely there's no evidence significantly more people would play TTRPGs if there were no D&D. The number of people playing these types of games, or even knowing they're a thing, has always been small. Without a critical mass of fans, it just never enters the public consciousness. In addition, a lot of people are very casual players and don't really want to have to learn a lot of rules or lore in order to enjoy a game. They just want to sit around with friends and family, roll some dice and eat some snacks. Obviously other games allow that as well, but the casual player is also more likely to gravitate towards whatever is possible. Much like a cartoon snowball rolling downhill, popularity breeds more popularity If an activity is worthwhile for the participants. D&D just happens to check the boxes of cultural recognition, relative ease of play, popularity. If it weren't for D&D I think the same would still happen with some other system, the potential consumers for the hobby is just too small.

It's all speculation of course. But I'm not throwing shade at other games just because I think a dominant game is a logical outcome.

 

[Oofta]

I domt even know why this is debated.

When 5E was released they talked about it being the last edition because they thought the game was dying. They assumed the core 3 books and a couple of modules would be the last ones ever written. Everyone from the dev team to the corporate people who funded the development of 5E as a way to keep the IP alive so they could diversify into other areas were surprised by it's success.

So they called it the final edition because they thought it would never make sense to spend money to develop any more books.

 

[Wolfpack48]

You see an awful lot of presentation of "a rising tide lifts all boats" with D&D, and everyone else should be glad of that, without a lot of evidence presented its true.

When I visit Drivethru I see a lot of non-D&D content. It would be interesting to see sales figures for all those, but I am guessing it's not insignificant. 5% of 100 is only 5, but 5% of a million is 50,000. The larger the player base D&D creates, the larger the pool of players who might be interested in trying something else.

 

[Campbell]

So, I do think the rising tide lifts all boats theory within the particular subset of group based archetypal fantasy action-adventure games. So, I know it's true that Pathfinder Second Edition can be selling far more than Pathfinder First Edition while being a much smaller segment. I think the same is true for Critical Role's upcoming game.

What I think is far less true is that it raises the tide of what I call the "drama club games" that are less about going on adventures and more about character focused dramatic stories. Not that D&D's popularity hurts or help the "drama club" scene, but that it doesn't really have a strong effect on it. Even less true in my experience is that say the Nordic LARP scene is dependent on the D&D scene to generate new players. These are essentially separate hobbies that share some of the same communal space.

Basically, the further away you get from the core model of D&D play the less the rising tide lifts your boat.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The question, though, is does it? That's an assumption, really. If 99% of the new players get sucked into the D&D ecosystem they're going to have to make active effort to get out of it. As often pointed out, with VTT play that's more practical than it once was, but that's probably still going to only be a thing for a tiny fraction that wasn't already playing that way.

Essentially, I'm not sure the impact is at all visible, once you spread it around among multiple other games, some still in the D&D sphere (PF2e, 13th Age, the OS sphere).

As you say here. If you increase the non-D&D player pool by 5%, who's going to actually notice?

Its not even an issue of being beneficial to an individual; its a question of whether, in practice, its visible to anybody.

None of us individually know or will ever know. That's correct and exactly the point.

Which means that yeah... the question of "Is the dominance of D&D good or bad?" has no articulated answer with regards to players playing other games. So really... it's an unnecessary question to ask, and an even more unnecessary question to bother wasting our time trying to answer. Because none of us know the true answer... all we know is what the answer is for us. But that doesn't help anyone else.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You see an awful lot of presentation of "a rising tide lifts all boats" with D&D, and everyone else should be glad of that, without a lot of evidence presented its true.

I am not seeing any evidence to the contrary either however… the premise certainly makes more sense than the alternative to me. If you have no one attracting players, how does that benefit anyone?

I can certainly see a case that once attracted to TTRPGs some people will branch out from the game they started with. I know I did

I think that is the case. We have no proof if the "rising tide" metaphor in this case is actually true... but some people are then just using their logic and reason to presume it probably has to be. The more people who come into the hobby via D&D, the bigger the pool of players to potentially play other games. It's a logical argument to make.

But that's not proof, you are right about that. All we have is our own reasoning to suppose that it is.

 

[Shardstone]

When 5E was released they talked about it being the last edition because they thought the game was dying. They assumed the core 3 books and a couple of modules would be the last ones ever written. Everyone from the dev team to the corporate people who funded the development of 5E as a way to keep the IP alive so they could diversify into other areas were surprised by it's success.

So they called it the final edition because they thought it would never make sense to spend money to develop any more books.

Yeah I know that but I mean, why are we taking marketing so seriously? It's marketing.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I have to ask....

Am I the only one who thinks of a cow when they see this thread?

 

[Oofta]

I have to ask....

Am I the only one who thinks of a cow when they see this thread?

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I appreciate a good Kung Pao Enter the Fist meme as anyone but associating this thread to that movie is udderly ridiculous.